Bad Parenting

You may be wondering, "Where is all the new, semi-regular content that Jay promised?" I'm wondering that too. I have a confession to make.

I haven't been inspired to blog. Sorry, but it happens. Now, there is something I want to blog about, but it would take a significant amount of time that I should be using on a computer program that's due tomorrow night or studying for a midterm I have on Wednesday or studying for the other one I have on Thursday (although the program is due for the same class that I have a midterm for on Thursday, so doing the program would be doing double-duty). So, I'm allotting until 11 pm to finish this post, and whatever I have at that point, I'll wrap up and post. Here we go.

Yesterday, I went to see Date Movie. Needless to say (but I will anyway), a terrible movie, but a friend of mine who graduated from Lehigh my freshman year was on Spring Break and thus in the area, and a bunch of us wanted to go see a movie, so we chose Date Movie. It didn't matter what the movie was; we just wanted to go see a movie together.

About halfway through the movie, a police officer came into the theater and went up a few rows above us to exchange some words, which I didn't catch, with someone. After about a minute, the officer left. Then, maybe 5 or 10 minutes later, a loud argument erupted between two women. Besides some expletives, I heard one of the women saying something to the effect of, "You shouldn't be bringing your f***ing daughter here! What's wrong with you?" As I figured out later, one of the women had brought their young (maybe 10 years old?) daughter with her to the movie. Point taken, but it hurts your case when you're cursing as you're saying that particular statement.

And I realized how terrible both of these women probably are as parents (I assume that the woman who was chiding the other woman for bringing her daughter to the movie is also a parent). I don't think I'm being too judgemental to say that; if you don't have the common sense to know that Date Movie (rated PG-13 and full of sexually suggestive scenes and vulgar language) isn't appropriate for your 10 year-old daughter, you're likely making a lot of other parenting mistakes.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that parenting is easy. I fully acknowledge that it's not; partially for that reason and my fear of screwing up, I don't want to have children. However, I think the above example is a pretty clear cut situation where both women were in the wrong.

Here's where I'm going to make a leap, because this incident got me thinking: How is it possible for parents such as the above to exist? Plus, from Dubious Quality (linked on the side of this blog under Links), I found this article. What is wrong with people? How could they possibly believe that it's ok to treat your children like cattle? Or maybe they realized it was wrong but did it anyway, an even worse possibility.

To be clear, I'm not equating the type of parenting exhibited in the article with the type of parenting that led to the 10 year-old being at an inappropriate movie for her age, but they are both troubling for different reasons. Obviously, the women in the movie theater shouldn't be arrested for their behavior (unlike the couple in the article, who should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law), but they should know better.

I have more to say, but it's well past 11 pm now, so I've got to get cracking on other things. If I can regain my train of thought, I may talk about this more later.